Noted author and editor Ron Silliman will read from his work Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Ciné, 234 W. Hancock Ave. Sponsored by the English department’s Helen Spencer Lanier Lecture Series and creative writing program, the event is free and open to the public.
Silliman is the author and editor of more than 30 books, with his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is the 2006 Poet Laureate of Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council and a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. In 2010, he received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation.
Influential in contemporary poetics, Silliman became associated with the West Coast literary movement known as Language poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. He edited In the American Tree, which remains the primary Language poetry anthology, and he wrote one of the movement’s defining critical texts, The New Sentence. A champion of experimental or post-Avant poetics, he reaches millions of readers through Silliman’s Blog, a weblog he started in 2002 that is now one of the most popular contemporary English language poetry blogs.
Silliman taught at San Francisco State University, the University of California-Berkeley, Brown University and the Naropa Institute. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area, he moved to Pennsylvania in 1995 where he works as a market analyst in the computer industry.